EPICS and Beyond

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EPICS and Beyond
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Background Personal Development Planning (PDP)
SST (Student Support Tutoring)
1st Newcastle-Nottingham PARs project, 1998-2000

• Internet-PARs
• 2 DfES funded projects
• PDP focus
• Based on the
• personal tutor model

• ePortfolios
• FDTL-4 project
• PDP in curriculum context
• Evidencing outcomes
• Less emphasis on the tutor model

2nd Newcastle-Nottingham PARs project, 2000-02
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ePET Portfolio (software to match your pedagogy)
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Speech therapy
Generic tools
Postgrad Research
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Recent projects

• Building on 3 collaborative projects (FDTL-4
  DEFS)
• FDTL Transferability (ePortfolios _at_ St Georges)
• Dental ePortfolios Consortium
• Postgraduate CRS (University-wide, Newcastle)
• A number of other collaborative projects

JISC Projects

• ePortfolio Extensions Toolkit (ePET)
• Involvement in 3 Regional ePortfolio pilots (FE
  HE)
• EPICS (North East)
• IAMSECT Shibboleth single sign-on project

Centre for Excellence in Healthcare Professional
Education (CETL4HealthNE) ePortfolio support
for a number of strands in a HEFCE funded CETL
in Health (North East)
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ePET Interoperability Project

• Funded as part of the JISC DEL programme
• http//www.eportfolios.ac.uk/ePET

• Aims
• Consolidate and document the generic
  ePortfolio and make it freely available to the
  JISC community.
• Develop a standards compliant Web Services
  interface to the ePortfolio.

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• - ePET has been designed so that it has the
  potential to support a range of different
  specifications e.g.
• Learner Information Package (LIP)
• UK Learner Profile
• Enterprise / Content Packaging
• ePortfolio (early stage of development)
• -Dictionaries can be created for different
  specifications.
• -New portfolio tools created by third party
  developers can mapped to the dictionary(s)

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ePET RESTian Approach

• Using REpresentational State Transfer (REST)
  which is
• is an architectural style for large-scale
  software design (Roy Fielding, 2000).
• uses a small, globally defined set of Http
  Methods (GET and POST, and secondarily PUT,
  DELETE, etc)
• Unique resourse identifiers (URIs) for both
  artifact-resources as well as distinct
  application-states

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ePET RESTian Approach 2

• explicit rather than implicit
• uses hyperlinks as the "engine" of
  application-state transitions
• URI /epet/scheme/component/-parameters
• /epet/LIP1/all/-/target_user-n1stu
• /epet/LIP1/cv/-/target_user-n1stu

Request
Dictionary Look-up
Intermediate LIP
XLST gttrue LIP
Send XML (eg. via SSL)
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EPICS - North East regional collaboration around
e-portfolio progression pathways with
illustrative studies Part of the JISC
Distributed e-Learning Programme. Partners
include 5 HEIs FE colleges (OWL network)
JISC Regional Centre Case studies -demonstrate
feasibility / scalability -supporting life-long
learning http//www.epics.ac.uk
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EPICS Overview

• Pedagogy
• established a Regional Forum for PDP
• Governance
• developed 5Ps model for analysing policy,
  practice etc.
• Technical
• 5 case studies interoperability FE/HE
• Shibboleth single sign-on

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EPICS Interoperability

• Case study (FE -gt HE)
• Student initiated transfer
• IMS LIP via XML-RPC feed
• Currently via remote login
• -soon authentication c/o Shibboleth single
  sign-on

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• ePET -gt Blackboard Portfolio
• ePET export Zip (IMS-LIP)
• Bb import Zip file
• XSLT transform to HTML files
• Blackboard Portfolio -gt ePET
• Problematic Bb little support for LIP
• ISP needs to standardise tags
• Export to ZIP
• Import into ePET as files
• some XSLT where IMS LIP tags have been used

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Educational Benefits of Interoperability

• Continuity in life-long learning learning
• School HE Continuing Development
• Explicit recognition of prior learning
• Focus on continuous development, not episodic
  learning
• Integration with the wider MLE

Life-long personal learning space Serial
transfer of data Aggregators of multiple
portfolios / blogs
Alternative models

• Portfolio learning triggered by events in the
  VLE / MLE
• Integration with other systems
• eg. portfolio record generated by admin systems
  after attending a workshop prompt for
  reflection

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Event-driven data transfer e.g. Postgraduate
Research Students (Newcastle University)
Portfolio
Workshop Booking System
Workshop attendance is confirmed by an
administrator. This initiates secure transfer
of course attendance record(s) to the ePET
portfolio (IMS LIP). Learner(s) choose to accept
the record and can add additional personal
reflective notes, cross-references etc.
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JISC SURF Meeting, Nottingham 2006
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Evaluating the use of hand-held computers to
access electronic portfolios and clinical
guidelines in a wireless environment for
undergraduate medical education Cotterill SJ,
Jones S, Walters RA, Horner P, Moss JD, McDonald
AM On behalf of the CETL4HealthNE
Pilot with 31 students started March 2006
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Further information http//www.eportfolios.ac.uk
S.J.Cotterill_at_ncl.ac.uk
Cotterill SJ., McDonald AM., Drummond P., Hammond
GR. Design, implementation and evaluation of a
generic e-portfolio the Newcastle experience
(ePortfolios 2004, La Rochelle)
Paper available at http//www.eportfolios.ac.uk
Centre for Excellence in Healthcare Professional
Education (CETL4HealthNE)
http//www.cetl4healthne.ac.uk Director Prof.
Geoff Hammond G.R.Hammond_at_ncl.ac.uk